It would not be difficult to show that the true and highest idea of Christian charity is remote from this conception of a dependent status as inherent in a certain portion of society. What seems to be needed here, as in so many aspects of morality and religion, is to combine the inspiration and _abandon_ of the modern mind with the definiteness of purpose and lucidity of plan that characterised the ancient City-state. Socialism, at its best, [1] unites with recent political economy and with those who try to “organise” or rationalise charity, in challenging the preconception that poverty must be recognised as a permanent class-function. And this brave denial may remain written to its credit when the controversies of immediate method are forgotten. [1] I cannot think that in detail its advocates are consistent with their principles on this point. But controversy is not my object here. We may attempt to indicate in a few words the direction in which the ethical idea incarnate in the institution of the “poor” is tending to supplement and modify itself as clearer notions of a commonwealth arise. It may be observed, by {319} way of introduction, that we cruelly misconceive the Greek mind when we ascribe to it a want of love and compassion, because we miss in its utterances the religious note of devotion to the poor. [1] To a great extent the truest idea of charity was presupposed in the very axioms of a Greek commonwealth. The Greek spoke little of “the poor,” because he recognised no such status. [2] It would have meant to him a functionless class, a dislocation of the body politic. This, in fact, is what it did mean when pauperism began to press upon the Greeks, and the philosopher [3] at once diagnoses the evil, and uses the term, “people without means,” _i.e._ without ways of supporting themselves, instead of the older word, which rather suggests the “object of ‘charity’”. To get them back into a function, “a means,” is the course which _ipso facto_ rises before him; not to create a new ethical idea for their sake _qua déclassés_. [1] Not altogether true, of course. In Homer “all strangers and poor men come from Zeus.” [2] It is a mistake to treat all these problems as automatically solved for the ancients by slavery. The citizen population had enough dependence on industrial life to be liable to disaster from its dislocation, and that this happened so little was a true success while it lasted.